DETERMINING AN INTERCHANGE STANDARD FOR THE NATIONAL SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE OF TURKEY

摘要

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been receiving a growing interest from both public and private sectors in Turkey. Nevertheless, nationwide organizations dealing with spatial data have to have an effective way of sharing data to timely and economically meet ever evolving requirements. A National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) would greatly improve the accessibility, communication, and use of spatial data and enable nationwide data sharing. One of the most important technical requirements in building and maintaining the NSDI is a spatial data interchange standard. Due to the fact that designing a spatial data interchange standard is a colossal and long-term operation and acceptance as a "standard" in the end is not guaranteed, it would not be reasonable to design a new standard from scratch. Instead, a worldwide spatial data interchange standard could be adopted. To this end, a number of evaluation criteria which examine a spatial data interchange format in terms of its data model, implementation, and interchange environment have been determined. And DIGEST (Digital Geographic Information Exchange Standard), SAIF (Spatial Archive and Interchange Format), and SDTS (Spatial Data Transfer Standard) have been examined by the evaluation criteria. As the result of the evaluation, SAIF has been found to be the most appropriate. Identifying the need for NSDI in Turkey, this paper briefly presents the evaluation criteria and the evaluation.